


Control Theory

by linguamortua



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hand Jobs, Manipulation, Mildly Dubious Consent, Power Imbalance, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 08:15:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: In control system engineering, control theory deals with the control of continuously operating dynamical systems in engineered process and machines. The objective is to develop a control model for controlling these systems, eliminating delay or overshoot and ensuring stability. To do this, a controller with the requisite corrective behaviour is required.‘Some blade runners only ever follow leads from HQ. Some lieutenants are satisfied with that level of initiative. I think you’re better than that.’ Madam shrugged. ‘Call me sentimental, but I like to see you apply yourself.’ Her smile was a hard, firm line, but it was there.‘Yes, ma’am.’





	Control Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [k8andrewz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/k8andrewz/gifts).



> Hi, friend! I found your letter through the Yuletide 2017 spreadsheet. Here's hoping that this Blade Runner fic is everything you could want from a random human on the internet!

_Where do you go when you go within? Within._  
_Where is the place in the world you feel the safest? Within._  
_Do you have a heart? Within._

 

* * *

 

‘Excellent work, K.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.’

‘We had gigabytes on this guy. Thought we'd lost him years ago. How on earth did you dig him up?’

‘It's all in my report.’ The question was confusing; everything was always in the report.

‘Of course. Tell me anyway, K. In your own words.’ Madam sat down on the edge of her desk. Outside, the livid neon ads were lively in the dark. She looked crisp and pressed, still, as hardy as any replicant. She had been in her office for fourteen hours. K had never once seen her shoulders slump.

‘It was the death certificate that gave him away. Forged. I checked the data manually, file by file. His serial number had been retired, but when I ran it at Wallace there was no entry. No body, no records except the death certificate.’

‘Trying to pass for human. What will they think of next?’

‘He got away with it for a long time.’

‘The last guy in your job had scratched him from the list. What made you pull up the old at-large index?’

K wanted to say, truthfully, that it was curiosity about his predecessor. Curiosity was not a desirable trait in a replicant. He told a useful lie.

‘Just going through the older cases, trying to be thorough.’

‘Real police work.’ Madam sounded pleased.

‘I went through the Academy,’ said K. Just like a real officer.

‘We keep you replicants tightly focused. We call in your leads. Some blade runners only ever follow leads from HQ. Some lieutenants are satisfied with that level of initiative. I think you’re better than that.’ She shrugged. ‘Call me sentimental, but I like to see you apply yourself.’ Her smile was a hard, almost-straight line, but it was there.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

On the way home, two drunk men trailed him for the half-block between his car and his apartment building. They weren’t stupid enough to make a move, but he could hear the low, rumbling sound of their hostility. Against the neon-charged snow their boots crunched, and his hackles rose defensively. It would be easy to intimidate them into bolting, but a shameful, obedient kernel of him wanted to be _better than that_. He closed the apartment building’s ornate door behind him, and breathed slowly and evenly. Joi could read his biometric points. She always worried when he got home stressed.

 

* * *

 

_What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked._  
_Do they teach you how to feel finger to finger? Interlinked._  
_Do you long for having your heart interlinked? Interlinked._  
_Do you dream about being interlinked?_

 

* * *

 

Sigma Lupe had died badly, hideously, ended by a shot fired through the bridge of her nose that collapsed her left eye. She had died sobbing and snarling. K’s face was marked with a spray of her blood. It had stiffened and dried on his way back to LAPD HQ. His face itched. He forced himself not to scratch.

‘She sold your kind out,’ said Madam, pouring a drink for herself, and then for him. ‘Fucked you over. She cost us a blade runner and dozens of catches with her little operation.’

‘They retired Officer D-77?’ K already knew the answer.

‘Put him on ice this morning.’ Madam curled back her top lip as she drank. She gestured to the other glass. ‘Take it. You need it.’ He obeyed without thinking, his muscle memory reacting to her order. ‘I’m more concerned by the replicants she smuggled out of our jurisdiction. Now I have to arrange fucking deals with Ventura and San Bernardino and those idiots in Orange County just to make a start on scooping them back up again.’

‘Four off the list,’ K said. The glass was very cold in his hand and he focused on that sensation to avoid thinking too deeply about anything else.

‘Don’t start down that road. You were never meant for hostage situations. That bitch was crazy.’

‘I should have noticed the trap door.’ Four aging replicants, last-chancers, blown apart by Lupe’s grenade. Currency to be used in exchange for her freedom. K should have taken that deal.

‘Dead or retired, it’s all the same, right?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, which would you rather?’

‘I know I don’t want to die.’

Madam laughed then, in her hard, bright way.

‘Christ, K, you tug on the heartstrings sometimes. It’s uncanny.’ She stalked the three paces between them, and K’s feet tensed on the floor. He wasn’t going to run. She looked like a predator. With the heavy-based liquor tumbler dangling casually from her left hand, she took his chin in her right. Turned his face one way and then the other, with incredible gentleness. K let her do it, although of course there was no ‘letting’ at all with the Lieutenant. ‘Soulful eyes,’ she commented, and let him go.

‘Can one have soulful eyes without a soul?’ he asked quietly. His glass was empty. Madam was close enough that he could smell the liquor on her breath.

‘Leave that to the philosophers to decide,’ she said. Abruptly something in her eyes made her look distant, and she turned to set her glass on the desk. In a long stretch, she keyed on her computer screen and her eyes scrolled left and right. ‘All right, K,’ she said. ‘You’re dismissed.’

As he reached the door he looked into the shiny door handle to see her already absorbed in work again. Today she had not told him that his work had been good. It happened sometimes. There had instead been a particular carving out of time for him; an association. His mouth still fiery-numb from alcohol, which sometimes took replicants that way, he considered the politics of being offered, and accepting, a drink. Did he owe her now? Or did she owe him?

 

* * *

 

_Feel that in your body. The system._  
_What does it feel like to be part of the system. System._  
_Is there anything in your body that wants to resist the system? System._

 

* * *

 

Replicants couldn't catch fevers, but K burned. The cold, hard line of the Lieutenant’s desk along the backs of his thighs did nothing to bring down his temperature. He was drunk.

He had let her get him drunk. It was very late, and the building must have been all but empty except for the night janitors; he had come to her very late, because she had summoned him from his home very late. So that the building would be quiet. When he arrived she had been sitting behind her desk. She barely looked at him when he came in.

‘Your baseline was a little off, earlier,’ she had said, by way of introduction. His baseline was off. Yes. He felt that. It must have been very slight, for her to have allowed him to leave after testing. Strange. ‘The Kwan case should have been simple for you.’

‘It was,’ K had told her, honestly. Then she had stood, in the way she had that made her look like she was unfolding very straight.

‘Have you been working yourself up, K?’

‘I don’t understand—’ but he felt his blood warm in his face. The Lieutenant let him stand there and blush as she poured them each a drink. She took hers and turned to press a key on her keyboard. Around the office, glass frosted itself into discreet opacity. She sipped. She looked with amusement at the second glass.

‘In your own time, K.’ He took the glass and leaned against her desk. Tonight he drank rather quickly, and the Lieutenant poured him another. She came in close to do it. When she spoke, K could feel her warm, whiskeyed breath on his cheek. ‘By the state of you, it’s clear why your baseline has deviated.’

‘I don’t understand,’ K said again, in almost a whisper. That he could lie to her told him exactly how deviated his baseline test must have been. There was no explanation for her lenience. Except, of course there was.

She reached down and pressed the heel of her hand against his cock. K’s body sagged from the point between his shoulder blades and the whiskey pitched about drunkenly in its glass. The desk held him up. He had never been touched so intimately before; at least, not in a way that did not have the clinical, detached air of a doctor. That he could get hard he had always known. That it could feel like this was new.

He fought for breath, and tried not to look at the Lieutenant. His hips curled upwards against the steady pressure of her hand.

‘Use a little initiative, Officer K.’ His hand stuttered against her hip, and she didn’t stop him. It crept down along the muscle of her thigh, over her expensive white dress, until his thumb met bare skin. She still did not stop him. Only last year a replicant had been battered almost to death and set on fire for touching a human woman. K’s hand shook, but he was not afraid of violence.

Turning his wrist, he ran his fingers up her inner thigh. She was warm and humid, and the closer his fingers drew to her, the more her hand worked over his cock. His fingertips touched the fabric of her underwear and eased it aside. Skin to skin. She sucked in a breath.

Again he wondered if he owed her, or she him.

‘Good boy,’ she told him. Some minute electric connection in K’s brain sparked. It coursed down him. His knees were liquid. Feeling the change in him, the Lieutenant lifted her knee a little to step over his legs. She was wearing perfume. He had never been close enough to her before to smell it. With very little effort, she could move until the tips of K’s fingers slipped into her cunt.

K’s head fell forward onto her shoulder. He did not want her to see his face. It felt suddenly imperative to prolong this strange moment. He tried not to think, tried only to focus on the movement of his fingers and his thumb and how the lean, muscled strength of her thighs felt against his own legs. He was sweating terribly, and his cock was leaking, and she was wet on his hand—and then between them was an alcoholic haze that left him dizzy.

She was rocking her body against his hand, and he was straining against hers, and both of them were breathing fast and sharp. K’s breath was coming out in whimpers. And then the Lieutenant’s cunt—his mind could hardly contain that thought—squeezed down on his fingers. The Lieutenant’s grip on K’s cock became almost painful for a moment, and her knee came up a little higher on his leg. She groaned, a sound almost like pain, and then relaxed. Her weight was against him, now. She did not stop stroking him, nor did he manage to move his hand.

They stood very close like this. Anyone coming through the door would not realise what was happening. It might look like the precursor to an embrace. Again K shivered from the knowledge of what he was doing; how profane his touch was in this office. It was enough.

When he came, K buried his face into the Lieutenant’s neck. The whiskey glass that he had held all this time fell to the floor and rolled away. His body folded and tensed in on itself; helpless, he let it happen. Later, in his car, he would become aware of the mess, but now he was all sensation. It was a minute before he could pull himself back to reality and stand, and collect the glass, and set it very carefully on the expanse of her desk.

Only then could he look at her. She was already retreating back behind her desk, and she did not return his gaze except with a brief glance.

‘Off you go, K,’ she said. She rearranged her clothes and thumbed the switch that unlocked her door. K’s feet started moving without his input.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, mouth dry and head swimming. ‘Thank you.’

 

* * *

 

_Do you get pleasure out of being a part of the system? System._


End file.
